Chapter Fifteen: Moira Park

What the public record eventually established is that by the early 2000s Jamie McIntyre and Henry Kaye were not two men who passed at conferences.

The Sydney Morning Herald would describe McIntyre as a close associate of the notorious property spruiker. His company employed Kaye's sister, Julia Feldman — a fact prised out of him under prolonged denial before a Senate committee. His operation took on David Loughnan, a Kaye man who moved from the collapsed empire straight into the next one.

And there was Moira Park.

The arrangement, as correspondence published years afterwards described it: sixty lots effectively given to Henry Kaye at one dollar a block, in return for assistance in coordinating the marketing of the scheme — an arrangement the letter said was agreed between Kaye, the writer, Jamie McIntyre and Julia Feldman.

The novel stages the room and marks it as invention.

October 2001. A room above a travel agency in Camberwell. Four people. A whiteboard with nothing on it. Kaye at the head of the table — not because he took it, but because the other three left it for him.

"Sixty lots," Kaye said.

"At?"

"A dollar."

Jamie was twenty-seven. He had companies now. Several — which was itself a technique learned in that building on St Kilda Road, the dense hedgerow of entities that turns a paper trail into a maze.

He had also learned, by then, the single most valuable physical skill in the trade, which is not to react to a number.

"For the marketing coordination," he said.

"For the marketing coordination."

Julia Feldman — who did the work, and got the smallest share, and would later be employed inside Jamie's own operation — said: "And the buyers pay?"

"Market," said Kaye.

And nobody in that room said the next sentence out loud.

This is the single most important structural fact about Australian land banking across two decades, and it is not a conspiracy and there is no smoking gun and there never will be, and the reason is that nobody ever needed to say it:

The buyers pay market.

The lots move to an insider at a dollar.

The difference is not stolen, in any sense that would satisfy a criminal court on a Tuesday morning. It is transferred — through a lawful-looking instrument, in a properly minuted transaction, from the people who earned it to the people who wrote the instrument.

Jamie drove home that night with the radio off.

And what he felt was not guilt.

It was what he had felt in the ute at nine years old, coming back from the saleyards.

Why isn't Dad the auctioneer.